Lulu Sessions’ remarkable story of cancer researcher facing own diagnosis

LuLu

WATERLOO — The opening scene in the film, The Lulu Sessions, shows a matter-of-fact cancer researcher named Dr. Louise Nutter receiving the news that she has an aggressive form of breast cancer.

Nutter, known affectionately as Lulu, takes the news with a kind of detachment, as if it the prognosis was for someone else. When will treatment begin, what kind of treatment?

And so began a remarkable 15-month journey for both Nutter and her friend, S. Casper Wong, at the time an aspiring filmmaker who decided on the spur of the moment to turn her camera on, to capture all these last moments.

"I think I started doing this for myself," said Wong in a phone interview from her home in New York City. "I call it hoarding."

The Lulu Sessions will be one of five films screened at the Zonta Film Festival which opens Tuesday at the Princess Twin Cinema.

The Lulu Sessions explores the life of one woman, albeit an extraordinary woman as she fights to maintain her dignity.

Nutter, 42 at the time of her diagnoses, was everything you wouldn't expect in a brilliant world-class cancer researcher, a pioneer who had just invented a new anti-cancer drug.

The film does not gloss over the fact that Nutter was a hard-drinking chain smoker, given to long strings of profanity, a woman who laughed loudly and who loved deeply. She was frustrating, anger-inducing, self-destructive and impossible to hate. She was also afraid, knowing the outcome of her type of cancer.

"I need to absorb this," she said in the film following that fateful phone call from her doctor. "Unfortunately, I know too much about it."

Wong is nearly as unlikely a film maker as Nutter was a scientist. An Asian American with a background in biomedical engineering, she worked for a year in a lab before deciding to switch to law. In the meantime, a fellowship posting to a cancer research centre in Taiwan brought this unexpected new friend into her life.

Nutter had been recruited to head up the new cancer research centre, and as the only two Americans at the facility, they ended up sharing housing. Even today Wong finds it difficult to define their friendship. They were so different, this potty mouthed Vermont-born farm girl and the over achieving young Asian.

"The relationship was quite unconventional," said Wong who will conduct a question-and-answer period after the film's screening, Tuesday. "We learned so much from each other." The relationship eventually turned romantic, though Wong had never previously thought of herself as a gay woman. Their shared intimacy is perhaps what gives this film its impact, its honest depiction of what happens after a terminal diagnoses.

"Despite how hard it was, I have a gem I wanted to share with other people," she said. "The film opens us to create a space that makes it OK (to talk about death)."

After returning from Taiwan, Wong completed a law degree, found a good corporate job, had a boyfriend and a nice car, yet her life seemed unfulfilled.

"I was always a creative child," said Wong. "I enjoyed problem solving and liked science as well." It would be Nutter who would see the depth of her friend's restlessness and encourage her to pursue her passion in film.

In fact another friend once commented that it was Nutter who birthed the film maker in Wong which turned out to be fortuitous.

The two had been long distance friends when Nutter fell ill. Wong was in New York and Nutter worked as a researcher and pharmacology professor at the University of Minnesota. Wong was on her way to shoot a wedding in California when she made that fateful side trip.

"I made a pit stop," said Wong. "I had all my camera gear with me. Her doctor called, her cancer was malignant."

The camera captured the first few minutes in black and white. That was unintentional, said Wong, but it gave the film even more impact, the stark reality of a terminal cancer diagnoses.

Nutter died in 2001 and it would be seven years before Wong pulled the film from storage and began editing.

"I was grieving," she said, adding that the film represented a painful time in her life, a deeply personal time, so she had to ask herself for what purpose would a public screening of the film serve?

Also playing: Forbidden Voices, stories of women standing up against restrictive regimes; Virgin Tales, about evangelical Christians calling for chastity; Girl Rising, recounting stories of girls around the world facing slavery, marriage and other injustices and finally, Revolutionary Optimists, about children taking action in slum areas of the world to help others.